How to build an effective pricing strategy

We interviewed leading software founders, investors, and Stripe experts to learn how they create an effective pricing strategy—from customer discovery to packaging. Get the guide to learn insights from partners at a16z, Stride, and Theory Ventures plus founders building venture-backed software companies.

How to build an effective pricing strategy

Duration 45 minute read Page count 31 pages

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Your guide to developing pricing strategies, as told by founders and investors

How to build an effective pricing strategy

Whether you’re just kicking off your pricing journey or wondering how to iterate on an existing model, SaaS pricing can be notoriously difficult. Here are key takeaways from our interviews with founders and investors:
  • Customer discovery and pricing is a continuous process: Your product and pricing will likely need to evolve as the market’s needs and expectations change.
  • Your pricing says a lot about your brand: The price of your product is a signal of quality. Customers often place lower value on something they’re getting for free. Inversely, if your product is expensive, customers will have higher expectations.
  • Your pricing strategy heavily influences how you build your business: The way you build your go-to-market strategy and hire a team around it will be heavily influenced by the price of your product and the buying process it invites.
  • Economically quantify user pain and align your price to the realized value: An effective pricing strategy successfully aligns the price of your product with the value a customer gets from using it.
  • Complexity kills: In the early stages, keep things simple for your potential buyers. The concept of optionality often conceals complexity in your product and pricing.

We spent months gathering feedback. It informed the product we built and who we built it for, and enabled us to build up a waitlist of eager adopters.

Nick Telson-Sillett

One-size-fits-all pricing means you’re likely going to leave a lot of money on the table, because you’re not differentiating between user types who might need different things, or perhaps have varying abilities to pay.

Morgane Zerath

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